Liberal counterattack on outreach falls flat

The NDP plan is cut from a different cloth than the government’s attempt to woo ethnic voters

On a day when Liberals had every reason to be contrite, Community Minister Bill Bennett was in full attack mode.

It was the last question period before the provincial election.

Earlier on Thursday, the damning report on the scheme to use government resources to woo ethnic voters to the Liberal Party was released. It confirmed allegations that public officials committed serious breaches of their duties, mixed party and government business, misused government funds and used private emails to try to cover their tracks.

While acknowledging that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett concentrated on hammering home the government’s talking points, conveniently leaked to my colleague Vaughn Palmer earlier in the day.

The key message was that the Liberals had apologized and dealt decisively with their scandal while NDP leader Adrian Dix refused to acknowledge an equally serious breach by his caucus.

“The NDP have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” he said, citing another leaked document that Bennett said showed they set up what he called a slush fund for illicit purposes, using money for political purposed that was supposed to be used by individual MLAs to pay for expenses in their riding.

Conveniently for Bennett’s attempt to deflect attention off the Liberal’s scandal, most of that money was used to pay a contractor for outreach services in multicultural communities.

So were the Liberals and the NDP essentially up to the same nasty business, misusing government resources to try to gain support from multicultural communities?

There are similarities. We only learned about both schemes from leaked documents. Without the leaks, there is no indication that either would have told us what they were up to.

The really damaging material about the Liberals came out after the initial leak was investigated by a team of deputy ministers, who confirmed that the details were as bad as could have been imagined.

The leaked document that informed the stories about the NDP outreach fund was a draft management letter from Auditor General John Doyle to the Legislative Assembly management committee, which includes Liberal and NDP MLAs.

The management committee was plucked from the obscurity in which it had long operated last summer by a devastating report from the Auditor General, who found the books on the internal affairs of the legislature were so poorly kept he couldn’t tell in many cases whether money was being properly spent or purloined.

It was in that murky world that the NDP caucus fund was set up, with the blessing of the comptroller general, in 2005. That comptroller has since been replaced.

Every NDP MLA contributed $ 200 a month from the money they received for constituency expenses to a fund that could be used for what were considered to be common benefits that they couldn’t otherwise afford.

One of the primary uses of the fund was to hire Gabriel Yiu for multicultural outreach, primarily in Chinese communities . Yiu was hired as a contractor, according the New Democrats, not an employee. He did work for caucus, being paid as much as $ 75,582 in 2008 to a low of $ 31,841 in 2012. For that he provided translation services and attended events with MLAs.

He also wrote articles denouncing the Liberal

What the Liberals were doing was trying to use government resources, not just caucus funds, for the benefit of the political party.

government, but New Democrats say he did that on his own time, not for them. When he ran as an NDP candidate he wasn’t being paid from the fund.

When the auditor general finally took a look at the arrangement, he said it was inappropriate and a partisan use of funds, which is contrary to the guidelines given for the use of constituency funds in the MLA’s handbook.

When they got that advice from the auditor general, the NDP stopped using the fund.

So were the two breaches the same? Hardly.

To equate the two is to say there is no difference between the work MLAs do for constituents and the work political parties do to secure votes. Constituency work is political in the sense that everything a government does is political.

If people like what you are doing, they are more likely to vote for you, whether as a government or an individual MLA.

What the Liberals were doing was trying to use government resources, not just caucus funds, for the benefit of the political party. They were looking for “quick wins.” That was wrong and elements of it may even have been illegal.

What the NDP did was also wrong under the rules of the legislature, but the scheme met the loose standards of the time when it was set up, standards under which the Liberals had also been happy to operate until challenged by the auditor general. When it was finally flagged as inappropriate, not by the Liberals but by Doyle, it was shut down.